I truly believe that blockchain and digital currencies will overtake the traditional currency systems we have today as they’re better in almost every conceivable way. The volatility is what makes many people hesitant but there is no such thing as a perfect investment. Crypto’s are still in their very early stages and the fact that every exchange acts independently with no central body determining the price can cause a lot of fluctuation in the prices.
Do note that this will put your portfolio out of balance. But it’s prudent to do this as a measure of risk mitigation whenever your portfolio has been doing incredibly well. The market won’t go up forever, and you can rest assured that there will always be another correction. By taking profits in Bitcoin, you partly secure your profits while at the same time staying in the game lest you miss out on another leg of a bull run.
Psychologically, if it’s helpful, I think it may be fine to sell off some small portion of your upside if you do realize upside over time, in order to recoup your initially invested principal. I don’t think that this is necessarily the most optimal actual move to make, but do think it likely makes a huge difference psychologically, such that it makes it far easier for you to hold your remaining investment with sangfroid in the case that it ends up cratering sometime in the future.

This is fine most of the time, as generally the customers of that bank won’t all try to cash out at the same time, and the bank is able to stay liquid. However, the moment customers start to question the bank‘s financial stability, things can go south very quickly. If just a small number of customers begin asking for all their deposits back, a bank can rapidly become depleted of all its liquid funds.

Anyone who has been drawn into the Apple ecosystem probably knows how powerful these can be. There are cryptocurrency projects that are creating ecosystems. We believe that successful ecosystems in the blockchain space will do exceptionally well long term. This is because they create efficiencies and are quite difficult for businesses to switch away from.
Long downtrends in bear markets can last weeks or months in crypto (and Bull markets can last a long time to)… so be aware of the overall trend! Meanwhile dips in a bull or stagnant market can last hours or days and rallies in a bear market can last hours or days as well. It is general wisdom that one should avoid being a bull in a bear market, and avoid being a bear in a bull market. The trick is understanding what market we are in, in a longterm bear market you’ll want to buy slowly and be willing to take profits, in a short dip in a bull market you may want to spam the buy button. If you don’t know which type of market we are in, slowly creating a position and planning for the worst is far more conservative (assuming the asset is going to zero, and making sure you have enough cash on hand to buy all the way to zero, is about as conservative as it gets).
Of course, last year's cryptocurrency craze ran circles around traditional equities, including stocks. After beginning the year with a combined market cap of just $17.7 billion, the aggregate market cap of all virtual currencies by year's end had surged to $613 billion, equaling a climb of more than 3,300%. There may not be another year like this for any asset class for as long as we live.
Steindorff: Distributed Global Fund II is a long-only, stage agnostic investor in protocols. We invest in the tokens of established protocols and in the seed and pre-ICO rounds of early stage protocols. In either case, we look for protocols that are well positioned to capture market share from centralized incumbents. The protocols we invest in share three common traits: they are tokenized, open source and decentralized. We believe protocols with these characteristics represent a paradigm shift in how human economic behavior is organized and incentivized. This shift has the potential to fundamentally alter many of the world’s largest industries, and create investment opportunities that are desirable for thoughtful, long-term investors. It is important to note that we don’t employ leverage and we seek to be tax efficient, our investors are looking for broad exposure to this new digital asset class while reducing taxable events, transaction costs and exposure to unnecessary risks.

This fast has brought so much attention to altcoins, and it’s coming to be that a coin will go up in value simply because it’s on the market. So many new investors want to get in on the ground level, so they’ll pump impressive funds into initial coin offerings (ICOs) with the hopes of literally getting rich overnight. For many investors, this actually comes true. A coin will take off after releasing to the public and early investors are rewarded greatly.

How about investing in Ether (ETH) at the start of 2017 when it was worth less than $10? These spectacular gains would have made you extremely rich, and this possibility is what excites many entering into the cryptocurrency world. ICOs provides you with the opportunity to invest in the project at its earliest stage, and if they are successful in executing their vision, then investors will stand to reap the potentially tremendous returns.
I truly believe that blockchain and digital currencies will overtake the traditional currency systems we have today as they’re better in almost every conceivable way. The volatility is what makes many people hesitant but there is no such thing as a perfect investment. Crypto’s are still in their very early stages and the fact that every exchange acts independently with no central body determining the price can cause a lot of fluctuation in the prices.
I ended up making another big mistake here too, and figured that bitcoin had already gone up way too much, and that my best bet was to invest in some smaller altcoins as well. I made this decision after seeing litecoin (LTC) skyrocket from $4 to $40 in just a few days. The buzz at the time was that litecoin would be to silver what bitcoin was to gold. The price seemed incredibly low compared to bitcoin, and this made a superficial sort of sense (meaning, no sense at all), so I decided to jump in. For good measure, I also decided to jump into a few of the other most popular altcoins of the time — peercoin (PPC) and namecoin (NMC).

Stratis also recently announced its “Breeze Wallet”. This is a specialist wallet that aims to increase the privacy of both Bitcoin and Stratis platform users. This Bitcoin wallet will have Tumblebit built in, which is an incredible deal and will raise awareness of Stratis tenfold. This will likely trigger a price hike. Read our in-depth article on Stratis coin here.

It is when the next financial crisis happens and people are locked out of their bank accounts that they will see the power of crypto and bitcoin (think Greece and Cyprus). Outside of precious metals there is no other escape from the corrupt debt based fractional reserve monetary system the world is trapped in -- Also, there are like 3 billion people in the world that are unbanked -- that alone should get someone to take 1 percent of their net worth into crypto -- the risk reward is insane. As far as the criminal activity in bitcoin LOL!!! OMG banks have committed more fraud and crimes and nothing happens to them. Under federal and state laws known as civil forfeiture, police can seize cash or property if they suspect it's tied to an illegal activity even if the property owner isn't charged with a crime -- Supreme Court has upheld this. I am sorry I do not trust governments (who in their right mind would) and am glad there is a place I can hold some of my wealth outside of their reach.
“There will be a ramp-up time,” said Ari Paul, chief investment officer of Blocktower Capital Advisors LP. “There just isn’t a rush. The professional traders will mostly be looking to do arbitrage, between the futures and bitcoin itself. I don’t expect massive money flows right away but then I expect gradual buying from people who want passive exposure” without buying bitcoin directly.
Futures are financial contracts obligating the buyer to purchase an asset or the seller to sell an asset, such as a physical commodity or a financial instrument, at a predetermined future date and price. Futures contracts detail the quality and quantity of the underlying asset; they are standardized to facilitate trading on a futures exchange. Some futures contracts may call for physical delivery of the asset, while others are settled in cash.
On a bitcoin exchange, the investor trades at the coin's full price. For example, if bitcoin is trading at $8,000, an investor spends $8,000 on every coin priced at that amount. Most futures contracts involve leverage, allowing the trader to put up only a small fraction of the asset's price, but for bitcoin this "margin" is unusually high, at more than 40 percent. So the investor could control one $8,000 bitcoin for just over $3,200, plus a small fee for the transaction. If the price jumped 12.5 percent to $9,000, the gain would be 32 percent of the sum invested.
That said, it’s extremely important to keep in mind that one doesn’t get infinite opportunities to keep playing this bet out over and over again. There is only one bitcoin in the world, and we only have one opportunity to play out this exact bet. Given this fact, it’s important to realize that if this were somehow to actually be a perfectly EV neutral bet, with a possibility of a 150X upside and a 0.66% chance of realizing that upside, it would still mean that we have a 99.33% chance of losing all our money that we place on this bet. It would be extremely foolish, therefore, to invest all our money into such a wildly speculative investment, even if it is technically EV neutral or even slightly EV positive. What might make sense, is to set aside a responsibly proportionate amount of money specifically earmarked for such wildly speculative investments as a part of a holistic investment portfolio, that one is fully willing and able to lose without significant impact to one’s well-being or quality of life, and to invest that amount of money in a +EV bet like this.
Trading on this spot market is a lot like trading a stock, with prices governed by supply and demand, and no role played by a central bank, like the Federal Reserve. Since bitcoin is not yet accepted by many merchants, its value depends on speculators' view on what others will pay in the future. To detractors, that encourages bubbles. Advocates see huge potential profits.
There are so many hoops to jump through to set up for mining and each coin has its quirks. The power of your machine and graphix card and your power consumption are all important. My friend mined for 8month Eth and only made couple of hundred bucks by time you subtract power useage etc. He already had a powerful machine used in film industry for video graphix just sitting around so he thought he’d put it to use over that time for a laugh and see what happened. It took many hours messing around to set up and occassionally nursing it over that period. Of course he had to use his machine also occassionally which compromised the performance.

Due to the relatively low liquidity of crypto markets, the ease of market manipulation and the relative inexperience of traders, the market are super volatile. What might be considered a market crash within the stock market is a regular movement in Crypto? Entire market movements of +/-20% are entirely possible, and individual assets can drop -50% or grow +100% in a day. The stock market crash of 1987, known as Black Monday, saw +22% wiped from the Dow Jones, causing waves across the world. 22% movements in Crypto are normal.

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This, thus, requires anyone holding fiat currencies to have extreme trust that their government will manage their money supply responsibly, and not make poor financial decisions that will severely devalue the currency they hold. This compounds with the trust one must hold in the banks in which one deposits their fiat currency, to create an ultimate monetary system that has multiple points of very real possible failure, as history has shown time and again.
Indeed, some market movements are fundamentally unpredictable in their short term timing. Two very vivid examples of this were the collapse of Mt Gox for bitcoin, and the hacking of the DAO for ethereum. Both of these events absolutely cratered the price of bitcoin and ethereum respectively, and both of them were fundamentally unpredictable in their exact timing. These are examples of the black swan events I mentioned that are certain to continue playing a large role in short term price developments for bitcoin and all other cryptocurrencies at large, that make it doubly dangerous for those who day trade.
Right now, I can use my bitcoin holdings to pay for purchases at Overstock (OSTBP), or book a hotel on Expedia (EXPE). But if I use bitcoin to buy $25 worth of socks on Overstock today, and the price of bitcoin quadruples next week, I'll feel like those socks actually cost me $100. Then again, if bitcoin crashes, at least I'll always have the socks.
Price history: this is relevant if I have made the decision that I want to invest. If it is an established asset I will be looking at its long-term price history, does it move in cycles (see Siacoin as an example), if so, which cycle is it in right now or does it have stable growth (see DASH)? If growth is stable I am less sensitive to the current price as I believe in long-term growth, I will only avoid if it is in a spike and will wait for the price to settle. If it moves in a cycle, unless it is early in a cycle, I will wait until the end of the current cycle before investing.
Returning to the question of calculating potential investment upside here, there are countless other ways to make projections on the future potential value of bitcoin, and I encourage you to try to make some depending on your personal beliefs regarding the level of success bitcoin might have, and the ultimate utility it might provide to the world. For instance, if you see bitcoin primarily as a way to simplify making international transactions and cut out inefficiencies there, you might look to see what the overall market size is for a solution that might solve that problem and capture that market. Western Union, as one example, is a company with a market cap of $9 billion. Consequently, it might be reasonable to expect that bitcoin’s true ultimate value would be something roughly in that order of magnitude, if this were to be bitcoin’s one true long term use case.
This is when I first saw the light, and realized that investing in altcoins that I didn’t really believe in, and that didn’t really have any truly compelling reasons they would ever overtake bitcoin or deserve any level of market share, was an incredibly foolish move. It was certainly true that these altcoins did often gain on bitcoin and appreciated far more rapidly in many cases while the bubble held strong, but the moment it began to collapse, the altcoins were the first to go, and often fell all the way to zero.
Bitcoin isn’t just an unknown commodity: it will always be an unknown commodity. Bitcoin doesn’t have the fundamentals that investors typically use to analyze an asset. Most stocks or bonds can be analyzed based on some trait of the instrument. Stocks have P/E ratios and dividends, for example, while bonds have return percentages. Bitcoin has no fundamentals that can be easily measured.
Always create a profit/sell ratio for Bitcoin, because most of your profits from altcoins will first be turned into Bitcoin. Use the initial price you paid for Bitcoin for this, because if you use the price of Bitcoin when you took profits, you’re misleading yourself and increasing your risk exposure. This is because the price of Bitcoin has likely increased as well during the time it took for your altcoin value to increase.
The crypto market is being constantly flooded with people who just gamble their money without any solid cryptocurrency investment strategy. The reason for that are success stories that usually go viral. You hear about a person who turned a small investment into a life-changing sum and now you want to have skin in the game. What you don’t hear, however, are countless of stories of folks who wasted their precious capital because of making typical rookie mistakes.
Bitcoin futures have fairly extreme pros and cons to them. Contracts are leveraged in that you're paying a fraction of bitcoin's actual price when you buy futures, giving you a chance to profit off them. However, the contract has an expiration date in the near future. If the price is down when it expires, you can't simply hold and wait to see if it bounces back; you just lose.
The shares of each Vehicle are intended to reflect the price of the digital asset(s) held by that Vehicle, less fees and expenses. However, none of the Vehicles currently operates a redemption program and any Vehicle may halt creations from time to time. As a result, there can be no assurance that the value of a Vehicle’s shares will approximate the value of the applicable digital asset(s) held by that Vehicle, and indeed, in cases where shares are transferable, they may trade at a substantial premium over or discount to the value of such assets. Moreover, the prices of the underlying digital assets are derived from third-party indices and reference rates, and no assurance can be given as to the accuracy of these prices.
Over the last half a year, Cboe and CME were not the only entities to have a dig at crypto futures, and Bitcoin was not the only asset underlying these contracts. Since March, UK-based financial institutions were responsible for a steady supply of breaking news in this domain. In March, a British cryptocurrency exchange operator Coinfloor made headlines by announcing the launch of the first physically settled Bitcoin-based futures product.